Tuesday, 2 November 2010

It was a busy week in the European Union. The heads of state or government were in the limelight, because the summits or meetings of the institution called the European Council are at the centre of media attention, although a fair amount of the reporting in national media has been through the prism of domestic politics. (Nowhere is this clearer than in the United Kingdom, with perpetual political and media pressure to leave no veto unused.)

It might be a good idea to let the dust settle and to look at what we have at the European level. The customary mainstream documents are the conclusions and the explanation given by the president:

The general endorsement of the Task force on economic governance sets a few signposts on the road forward, but the summary on first two pages of the European Council conclusions relies heavily on the sources, the Task force report, a helpful factsheet and the proposals made by the European Commission:

The official conclusions from the European Council are, as we can see, only the tip of the iceberg: two pages above the surface, but a reading marathon below.

Mundane tasks

We can see the “tip of the iceberg” from another angle as well. Much of what the European Union does consists of important but mundane tasks, bundled under ‘union policies and internal actions’ in Part Three of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

While the summit stole the media limelight, last week the Commission churned out a number of relevant documents. These underreported reports and proposals concerned, inter alia, the Single Market Act, EU citizenship, a new industrial policy and the Commission Work Programme for 2011 (CWP 2011).

Ralf Grahn

P.S. There is a new kid (in a politico-zoological sense as well) on the French block of the multilingual Euroblog aggregator Bloggingportal.eu (which has grown to 687 blogs related to European affairs). The blog or web magazine Europe – 27etc has made its appearance. The slogan of the blog collective is: “Parce que l’Europe n’est pas une affaire étrangère”. There are six regular contributors (“les Cabris de l’Europe”, in a historic reference to the nationalist president de Gaulle; they write under pseudonyms, to guarantee freedom of expression), and nineteen guest writers have already signed up. Impressive start!